George Gissing: A Fan's Commonplace Blog

Commonplace 198  George & His Contemporaries: Matthew Arnold PART TWO.

We are looking at the special place George kept in his heart for Matthew Arnold, a man of many parts - prize-winning poet, public office holder, journalist, religious leader and expert on Homer (not the cartoon character) amongst them. George included snippets of Arnold's wisdom in his American Notebook, and even recorded in his Diary that he paid a visit to the great man's grave. There was something paternal in the way Arnold talked down to lesser mortals, not from an expressed sense of superiority but because he was one who knew truths and insights on topics such as culture and art. John Ruskin did a similar act, but with less of the authority and less of the common touch Arnold picked up from being for some time as an HM Inspector of Schools. In fact, the education of children from the lower classes was one of both John Ruskin's and Matthew Arnold's passions. George was more interested in how the masses should be contained and doubted their abilities could - or should - ever be developed.

 

George will have turned to Arnold as a father-figure in all things cultural life; his own father never managed to inspire that degree of reverence, despite being a poet and a well-read amateur scholar and scientist.

In the American Notebook, mostly written when he was in America on his gap year between prison and life back in Blighty, George made several entries from his reading of Arnold. One of the most significant must have struck a chord at exactly the right moment because it more or less sums up George's thoughts on the role of the writer as Artist in cultural life. It more or less sums up the rationalisations he used to explain his lack of popularity with the average reading and paying public, preferring to claim that he only wanted to be understood and appreciated by a select, educated, simpatico few. Here it is:

The functions of a disinterested literary class - a class of non-political writers, having no organised and embodied set of supporters to please, simply setting themselves to observe and report faithfully, and looking for favour to those isolated persons only, scattered all through the community, whom such an attempt may interest - are of incalculable importance. 

What better way to celebrate the life of Matthew Arnold than in naming an 'unadopted' road in Liverpool - 'unadopted' meaning the local council is not responsible for repairs. Now better known for being the road Beatle George Harrison was born in, at Number 12. See below.

Hugging this to his bosom must have made the poor book sales appear less of a bummer when George failed to set the world alight with the likes of The Emancipated. It must have felt like approval from someone of a similar bent - only a more popular and better-educated bent. Being a solitary cove who rarely swapped ideas with his peers, George will have appreciated the reputation Matthew Arnold had as a 'sage' writer - one who commented on social and cultural life from a perspective of one who has deep learning, often centring on ancient history, philosophy and politics, often through a religious perspective. It was the sort of thing highly-educated Classics scholars picked up from their reading, and was aimed at similarly well-read middle class who would recognise the sagacity of the references to Homer, Plato, etc. George considered himself a bit of a sage writer when he dealt with his siblings. They had to endure his superior intellect and its outpourings as he continued to judge them by his standards. In the case of Algernon, a somewhat underachieving writer who nevertheless churned out the stories trying to strike gold, it must have grated on his self-esteem to be constantly compared to his older brother. Algernon, if nothing else, was almost a tryer. 

More of the American Notebook snippets:

'The thing (culture) call it by what name we will, is simply the enabling ourselves, whether by reading, observing or thinking, to come as near as we can to the firm, intelligible law of things, and thus to get a basis for a less confused action and a more complete perfection than we have at present.'

Here we see the difficulty of giving a definition to terms such as 'Art' and 'culture' which are bigger than a single, simple understanding. Maybe these definitions worked in Arnold's day, but because the link between perfection and cultural achievement that he promotes was blasted apart by post-modernism, those views do not hold water, today. There is nothing sadder in the visual Arts than someone trying to talk and explain what a work is about; what it means; what its intent is. Artists never talk like this about their work because the work has to speak for itself. The Divine One, Oscar Wilde says (in The Picture of Dorian Gray ch 17) 'to define is to limit'. He also said Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. And with this, destroyed any notion culture was the realm of the educated and well-fed. 

With his dachshund, Max.

Of course, Arnold did not get away with all of his 'sage' offerings. He was considered anachronistically out of time on many things, and by the time George was writing quotes in his American Notebook, Arnold was not considered to be one who had captured the zeitgeist in a bottle. What he lacked was the 'common touch' of those he disparaged as 'New Journalists'. All his definitions of culture were not written for the ordinary reader, but take this, written by WT Stead, who did have the common touch - which is really what New Journalism was about: accessibility. Stead wrote, when his Review of Reviews started:

Culture, according to Matthew Arnold, consists in knowing the best thoughts of the best men upon the subjects that come before us. The aim of this magazine will be to make the best thoughts of the best writers in our periodicals universally accessible. When Thor and his companions travelled to Jotunheim, they were told that no one was permitted to remain there who did not, in some feat or other, excel all other men. Therein Jotunheim resembled the memory of man. All but the supremely excellent fades into oblivion and is forgotten. The first step towards remembering what is worth while storing in the mind is to forget that which is worthless lumber. The work of winnowing away the chaff and of revealing the grain is the humble but useful task of the editorial thresher. The work of selection will be governed solely by the merits or demerits of the articles, not in the least by the opinions which they may express. Without pretending to be a colourless mirror, in which may be seen, in miniature, a perfect reflection of the periodical literature of the month, the Review of Reviews will honestly endeavour, without fear or favour, without political prejudice or religious intolerance, to represent the best that is said on all sides of all questions in the magazines and reviews of the current month.

See? WT Stead valiantly claims the Nordic traditions for the common woman and man, and kicks the middle class Greco-Roman dominance out of the way. Something rather grand about that! 

 

Heimdall aka Idris Elba
guarding the Bifrost Bridge

More of the words George found wise:

M. Arnold says that business of criticism is simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas. Its business is to do this with inflexible honesty, with due ability; but its business is to do no more, and to leave alone all questions of practical consequences and applications, questions which will never fail to have due prominence given to them.

George enjoyed success towards the end of his literary career with his non-fiction. Works on his travels to Italy (By The Ionian Sea) and his criticism of the works of Charles Dickens are well worth going to for a taste of how good he can be with reality. His fiction could be pedantic and over-wordy, his descriptions un-involving and snide, but his work on Dickens, in particular, offers a rare opportunity to explore some of the unconsciously held but rarely expressed in print inner workings of George's mind - mainly because he is expressing his opinion and not sitting on any fence. 

The last mention of Matthew Arnold that George makes in his writings is this strange entry in his Diary for Wednesday, April 30th 1902 (about eighteen months before George died), possibly demonstrating how much he needed a father-figure to support him through his last struggle with syphilis; to reassure him there was a heaven he was on his way to; that his struggles had some point; and that his many transgressions would be forgiven. He wrote:

Impossible to account in any way for some of our dreams. Last night, I saw a corpse lying on a bed, and understood that it was Matthew Arnold. Just as he was about to be put in his coffin, I saw a movement of his hand, and cried out - 'He is not dead'. And he began to raise himself, and sat up, completely recovered. George with religious delusions that, Christ-like, he could raise the dead, caused by the paresis he suffered as a consequence of syphilis? Friedrich Nietzsche experienced something similar. 

 

Matthew Arnold is commemorated in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey click.